“Beethoven is the prophet of the new era which the Nineteenth Century ushered in for mankind. As things must be _felt_ before they can be acted out, so they must be expressed in the indefinite emotional forms of music before they can be uttered and definitely imaged forth in words or pictorial shapes. Beethoven is the forerunner of Shelley and Whitman among the poets, of J. W. Turner and J. F. Millet among the painters. He is the great poet who holds Nature by the one hand and Man by the other. Within that low-statured, rudely outlined figure which a century ago walked hatless through the fields near Mödling or sat oblivious in some shabby restaurant at Vienna, dwelt an emotional giant—a being who—through his outer life by deafness, disease, business-worries, poverty, was shattered as it were into a thousand squalid fragments—in his great heart embraced all mankind, with piercing insight penetrated intellectually through all falsehoods to the truth and already in his art-work gave outline to the religious, the human, the democratic yearnings, the loves, the comradeship, the daring individualities, and all the heights and depths of feeling of a new dawning era of society. He was, in fact, and he gave utterance to, a new type of man. What that struggle must have been between his inner and outer conditions—of his real self with the lonely and mean surroundings in which it was embodied—we only know through his music.”[69] Beethoven was the last great Classical composer. With Weber we enter a new school of music—the Romantic; and Carl Maria von Weber stands at the head of this Romantic School. The word _Classical_ is used in two ways: one, to define old works which have held their place in general estimation for a long time; and the other to describe works, written according to strict ideas of form, usually in the Sonata and Symphonic style. The great classical masters are Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The word _Romantic_ is used to define the works of the composers who came directly after the Classical composers and who wished to write in freer form, permitting more play for the imagination. The great Romantics are Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin. “Widely as the composers of this new school differed in other respects, they were alike in their susceptibility to the tone of thought and feeling which so deeply colored the romantic literature of their time. None of them were strangers to that weariness, approaching to disgust, of the actual world around them and those yearnings to escape from it which pursued so many of the finest minds of the generation to which they belonged. To such men it was a relief and delight to live in an ideal world as remote as possible from the real one. [Illustration: C. M. VON WEBER _By Schimon_]